Finals MVP Durant once considered quitting hoops

SAM AMICK

OAKLAND, Calif. - Some 17 years before Kevin Durant finally became an NBA champion — a Finals MVP no less for this Golden State Warriors team that fulfilled its super-team destiny over the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday night — he almost quit the sport.

The thought crossed his mind at different times over the span of two years during middle school, when the gangly kid from Seat Pleasant, Md., grew so tired of all those grueling training sessions with his godfather, Taras “Stink” Brown, that he wondered if it was all worth it.

He had been sleeping and studying in the corners of the Seat Pleasant Recreation Center during those days, doing all he could to take his game to another level and gain the kind of notice from elite area high school coaches that was curiously missing.

“As a kid, you want to play and have fun and go through things as a regular kid,” he told me in 2012. “But I wasn’t. I was always in the gym, always training. I was running hills, doing 100 laps a day. Basketball was the fun part. I barely touched the ball, but had the push-ups and the sit-ups — all of it. I was like, ‘Why do I have to go through this boot camp when I see the other guys not working as hard as me and they’re out there playing well on the AAU circuit?’ They’ve got high schools looking at them, private schools, and it wasn’t like that for me.” So, he told Brown he was done. “(Brown) said, ‘If you can’t play basketball, then you ought to be a ballet dancer,“’ Durant said. “I was like, ‘Nah, man, I can’t do that. I’m just going to quit.’

“He said, ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t come back, unless you want to be a basketball player.’ After a few days, I changed my mind. My mom was on top of me, too, and I got through it.”

Basketball has always been the fun part for Durant. That was true then, and it was true last summer when he kept looking west and noticing the joy that emanated from this hoops world that Bob Myers, Steve Kerr, Steph Curry, Draymond Green and the rest of the Warriors had created.

There was no my-turn-your-turn approach like he’d had for so many years in Oklahoma City. There was a selfless culture in place that was unlike most you’ll find in the NBA. There was a chance to start a new chapter and, if all went according to their grand plan, maybe even be part of a dynasty one day. And for a 28-year-old who once wondered if he’d ever get to play in college, he couldn’t pass up.